DCU’s Professor Alan Smeaton and Professor Philip Lane, Governor of the Central Bank of Ireland have been awarded the prestigious Gold Medal of the Royal Irish Academy.

The medals, which are sponsored by the Higher Education Authority, are awarded to individuals who have made a demonstrable and internationally recognised, outstanding scholarly contribution in their fields.

Professor Alan F Smeaton, Director, the Insight Centre for Data Analytics and Professor of Computing at Dublin City University has been awarded the Gold Medal in the Engineering Sciences. Professor Smeaton has a world-leading research reputation in the field of multimedia information retrieval. The underlying theme of his research career is the development of technology to support human memory: how it works, why it fails, and what we can do to help when it does. His work is focused on engineering a parallel, digital memory using sensors like wearable cameras and sensors for our physiology and our activities to act as a ‘black box’ for our lives that we can query, refer to, summarise, even that we can delete things from.

There was much excitement in the foyer of the School of Computing last Saturday at the National Finals of the All-Ireland Programming Olympiad (AIPO) among parents and siblings of the school going competitors. With the atmosphere fuelled by numerous teas, coffees, Fidelity cupcakes and sweet cart jellies, spectators witnessed three perfect scores in the final minutes of the 5 hour Algorithmic Programming Olympiad.

Teofil Camarasu, Leaving Cert student from Dundalk Grammar School, amazingly posted a perfect score on all problems after just 2.5 hours of the 5 hour competition. A very strong performance from the IOI2015 Team Ireland member and bodes well for his chances of making Team Ireland again this year for IOI2016 in Russia.

The next to post a perfect score after 4 hours of the competition was the hardened competitor, John Ryan, Transition Year student from St. Joseph's College Tipperary. John won the Junior section of the AIPO 2014 and has been a regular prizewinner at the BT Young Scientist competition.

Finally, with just 15 minutes to go, Eoin Davey from Summerhill College Sligo, cracked the final problem and got his perfect 450 point score.

Google HashCode is a team competition where teams a given a real-life engineering problem from Google to solve. Past problems have included Optimizing Street View Routing or planning altitude and direction of a fleet of LTE equipped balloons to provide Internet to remote areas. This year, students had to solve a Drone Delivery problem, efficiently delivering orders from customers from multiple warehouses. See below for the problem statement.

The School of Computing, DCU, in conjunction with ADAPT, the centre for digital content technology and the HEA, had a full house again this year with their cutting-edge ComputeTY programme for Transition Year students. The programme has continued to be hugely successfully over the last 10 years, and has become more innovative and hi-tech over time. Transition Year students now have the opportunity to study mobile app development for Android phones and tablets; learn how to design and build websites; and also learn the fundamentals of computer programming using the Java language.

The primary goal of ComputeTY is to de-mystify computer programming for Transition Year students and allow them to make a more informed decision about studying computing at University and IT as a career choice. Professor Rory O’Connor the Head of School of Computing at DCU says “transition year students really enjoy the opportunity to come to DCU and participate in this programme. Not only does it give them an opportunity to learn new technical skills, it also gives them a taste of college life which they will not have experienced before”.